Miroslav Ponc

Czech composer. Born 1902 in Vysoké Mýto, died 1976 in Prague. A pupil of Suk and Hába at the Prague Conservatory and of Schoenberg privately, he wrote avant-garde pieces in the 1920s, but subsequently devoted himself to theatre: he conducted at the National Theatre in Prague from 1945 and wrote over 100 incidental scores.

As a member of the Brno section of Devětsil, he was among the most widely traveled of its members, having been associated in Berlin (1922-23) with Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm circle and enterprises, and having established contacts with such Bauhaus artists in Weimar as Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Oskar Schlemmer. From these associations, as well as from his familiarity with Wilhelm Ostwald's color theory, Ponc developed a system of equivalents combining the tones of color and music, for instance in his work Big Canonical Preludium.